BY LIV LEADER | Tony Bing introduced John Wallach, Sunday evening’s lecturer, hailing him as “a model of what we want students to do.” Wallach, a former journalist, is the founder of Seeds of Peace, an organization that brings together young people from areas of conflict in an attempt to transform them into “seeds” of peace.
The camp brings Israeli, Palestinian, Bosnian, Serbian, and other young people from troubled parts of the world to a summer camp in northern Maine. The youths spend their time learning about the human side of the other campers that their culture has taught them to hate.
In his lecture, Wallach spoke to a relatively small audience of prospective students, faculty, and Earlham students about today’s crisis in Kosovo. Wallach divided his lecture, presenting both the Serbian and Albanian point of view.
In the course of his talk, Wallach gave a lengthy history of the Serbian and ethnic Albanian people and their historic conflict over the Kosovo region. Wallach described the current crisis in Kosovo as a conflict whose history goes back to the 14th century. Wallach described the region of Kosovo as a holy land for both Serbs and Albanians.
Wallach posed a difficult question to the audience, “How can you protest the NATO use of force when one is using ethnic cleansing?” Although Wallach had no solution for the current crisis, he provided the audience with a perspective on how to heal and perhaps prevent the type of violence we see today.
He referred to this solution as “starting another offensive to stop the dehumanization and start the re-humanization of society.” This other offensive Wallach called “preventive peace-making.” This type of peace-making is what Wallach teaches at Seeds of Peace. He believes that to find a solution to conflict, one must understand the history of where the conflict is coming from, and that here may be no clear-cut answer. One must understand “that there are two rights and perhaps two wrongs,” said Wallach.
Wallach seemed to ask not just the U.S. government, but the world where the effort to find answers to these difficult questions is. “Where is the commitment, where is the money, where are the programs to bring the enemies together?” asked Wallach. He continued, “It is high time to begin spending one tenth of one percent of the funds spent on peace keeping…on peace building.”
Wallach concluded his lecture reading an email from a young Serbian woman living in a bomb shelter. Her letter expressed the frustration she felt with her inability to show the outside world who the Serbian people really are. She wanted to tell the world that her people are not murderers; they are people just like you and me.
Tamer Mahmoud, a first-year politics major, attended the camp in 1993 and has been involved with Seeds of Peace ever since. “I thought it was very important to hear the lecture because it was important to hear both sides of the story, which is something you don’t really get through world media,” said Mahmoud.
After the lecture, Wallach received several questions in Goddard before moving to the Meetinghouse for a lengthy conversation.